He felt a sudden clotting in his throat. “No,” he said, “I can’t. But you can play for me. Would you mind doing that?”
“No,” she said. “Though you know I’m not very good.”
He peered into her eyes and placed his hands gently on her shoulders. “I never told you this before,” he said, “not in so many words. But you have it in you to be a great musician. Perhaps the best.”
Mery blinked. “Me?”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“My head is too large for my shoulders, anyhow, Mother says.” She frowned. “Do you suppose I could ever compose, as you do? That would be the very best thing.”
Leoff rose, blinking a bit in surprise. “A female composer? I’ve never heard of that. But I see no reason…” He trailed off.
How would such a creature be treated, a woman composer? Would she reap commissions? Would it bring gold to her pocket?
Probably not. Nor would it increase her chances of a good marriage; in fact, it probably would decrease them.
“Well, let’s talk about that when the time comes, eh? For now, why don’t you play me something—anything you want, something for funand then we’ll have a lesson, yes?”
She nodded happily and took her seat at the instrument, placing her tiny fingers on the yellow-and-red keys. She hit one experimentally and held it down, giving it a delicate tremble with her finger. The note sang so sweetly in the stone room that Leoff thought his heart would flow like warm wax.
Mery gave a little cough and began to play.
She began plainly enough with what he recognized as a Lierish nursery tune, a simple melody played quite naturally in etrama, the mode known also as the Lamp of Night, lilting, plaintive, soothing. Mery fingered the melody with the right hand, and with the left she added a very simple accompaniment of sustained triads. It was altogether charming, and his astonishment grew as he realized that he hadn’t taught her this—it had to be her own arrangement. He waited to see how it would continue.
As he suspected, the last chord hung unsustained, drawing him into the next phrase, and now the humming chords became a moving set of counterpoints. The harmonies were flawless, sentimental but not overly so. It was a mother, holding her infant close, singing a song she’d sung a hundred times before. Leoff could almost feel the blanket against his skin, the hand stroking his head, the slight breeze blowing into the nursery from the night meadow beyond.
The final chord was again unsustained, and very odd. The harmonies suddenly loosened, opened up, as if the melody had flown out the window, leaving infant and mother behind. Leoff realized that the mode had changed from the gentle second mode to the haunting seventh, sefta, but even for that mode the accompaniment was strange. And it got stranger, as Leoff realized that Mery had moved from lullaby to dream and nowquite quickly—to nightmare.
The base line was a Black Mary crawling under his bed, the tune had shifted to some nearly forgotten middle line, and the high notes were all spiders and the scent of burning hair. Mery’s face was perfectly blank with concentration, white and smooth as only a child’s could be, unmarred by the march of years, the stamp of terror and worry, disappointment and hatred. But it wasn’t her face he was hearing now but rather something that had come out of her soul and that clearly was not unmarred.
Before he knew it, the melody had suddenly broken: fragmented, searching to put itself back together but unable to, as if it had forgotten itself. The hush-a-bye had become a whervel in three-time, calling up images of a mad masked ball in which the faces beneath were more terrible than the masks—monsters disguised as people disguised as monsters.
Then, slowly, beneath the madness, the melody came back together and strengthened, but now it was in the low end of the scale, played with the left hand. It gathered the rest of the notes to itself and calmed them down until the counterpoint was nearly hymnlike, then simple triads again. Mery had brought them back to the nursery, back to where it was safe, but the voice had changed. It was no longer a mother singing but a father, and this time, at last, the final chord resolved.
Leoff found himself blinking tears when it was over. Technically, it would be surprising from a student of many years, but Mery had studied with him only for a couple of months. Yet the sheer intuitive power of it—the soul it hinted at—was nothing short of astonishing.
“The saints are working here,” he murmured.
During his torture, he’d almost stopped believing in the saints, or at least stopped believing that they cared about him at all. With a few strokes of her hands, Mery had changed all that.
“You didn’t like it?” she asked timidly.
“I loved it, Mery,” he breathed. He fought to keep his voice from trembling. “It’s—can you play it like that again? Just like that?”
She frowned. “I think so. That’s the first time I’ve played it. But it’s in my head.”
“Yes,” Leoff said. “I know what you mean. That’s how it is with me. But I’ve never metCan you start again, Mery?”
She nodded, put her hands to the keyboard, and played it again note for note.
“You must learn to write your music down,” he said. “Would you like to learn that?”
“Yes,” the girl said.
“Very good. You’ll have to do it yourself. My hands are…” He held them up helplessly.
“What happened to them?” Mery asked again.
“Some bad men did it,” he admitted. “But they aren’t here anymore.”
“I should like to see the men who did that,” Mery said. “I should like to see them die.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said softly. “There’s no sense in hatred, Mery. There’s no sense in it all, and it only hurts you.”
“I wouldn’t mind being hurt if I could hurt them,” Mery insisted.
“Perhaps,” Leoff told her. “But I would mind. Now, let’s learn to write, shall we? What’s the name of this song?”
She looked suddenly shy.
“It’s for you,” she said. “ ‘Leoff’s Song.’”
Leoff stirred from sleep, thinking he had heard something but not certain what it was. He sat up and rubbed at his eyes, then winced as he was reminded that even so simple a task had become complicated and somewhat dangerous.
Still, he felt better than he had for some time. The visit from Mery had helped him more than he cared to admit to himself, certainly more than he would ever admit to his captors. If this was some new form of torture—to show him Mery again and then take her away—his tormentors would fail. Whatever the usurper had said to him, whatever he had said back, he knew his days were numbered.
Even if he never saw the girl again, his life was already better than it would have been.
“You’re wrong, you know,” a voice whispered.
Leoff had begun to lie back down on his simple bed. Now he froze in the act, uncertain whether he had really heard the voice. It had been very faint and raspy. Could it be his ears, turning the movement of a guard in the corridor beyond into an indictment of his thoughts?
“Who’s there?” he asked quietly.
“Hatred is well worth the effort,” the voice continued, much more clearly this time. “In fact, hatred is the only wood some furnaces will burn.”
Leoff couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. Not from inside the room and not from the door. Then where?
He got up, clumsily lighting a candle and searching the walls as he stumbled about.
“Who speaks to me?” he asked.
“Hatred,” the reply came. “Lo Husuro. I have become eternal, I think.”
“Where are you?”
“It is always night,” the voice replied. “And once it was quiet. But now I hear so much beauty. Tell me what the little girl looks like.”
Leoff’s eyes settled to one corner of the room. Finally he understood and felt stupid for not guessing earlier. There was only one opening in the room besides the door, and that was a small vent about the length of a kingsfoot on each side, too small for even an infant to crawl through—but not too small for a voice.